Enterprises and other companies may reduce information technology (“IT”) costs by externalizing hardware computing costs, hardware maintenance and administration costs, and software costs. One option to externalize IT costs is by purchasing cloud computing processing and hosting from a third party cloud computing provider. Cloud computing providers purchase and maintain computer servers typically in server farms, and act as a utility company by reselling their computing capacity to customers. Some customers may be value added resellers (“VARs”), that are software companies who host their software applications on computing capacity from cloud providers. These VARs then make money by selling access to their software applications to customers. In this way, cloud computing providers directly externalize hardware computing costs and hardware maintenance costs, and indirectly externalize software costs by providing a hosting platform for VARs.
Cloud computing providers typically add infrastructure services, that provide common services for the cloud provider. Some infrastructure services are operating system-like services that control allocation of services of the cloud. For example, physical servers in server farms are typically disaggregated and resold in unitary blocks of service in the form of processing power, memory, and storage. Specifically, a unitary block is some unit to inform a customer of the volume of computing capacity purchased from a cloud provider. Consider a customer that purchases a unitary block of denoted, for example, one “virtual processor”. That customer may in fact be purchasing processing power where the virtual process is provided by different cores on a processor, different processors on the same physical server, or potential processing cores on different physical servers. The unitary block measuring computer service is proffered by the vendor, rather than a third party operating at arm's length.
Other infrastructure services provide services that support the cloud provider business model. For example, cloud providers typically provide different billing options based on metering a customer's usage on the cloud. A billing infrastructure is an example of an infrastructure service that supports the cloud provider business model. However, metering, service level agreements, and ultimately billing are often provided in terms of a vendor's chosen unitary measure.
Accordingly, customers are obliged to independently verify vendor claims about the unitary measure, or alternatively simply take the vendor at their word. Thus customers are faced with evaluating cloud provider claims without a ready point of reference.
Verification of claims about unitary services is not trivial. Cloud providers use infrastructure services as competitive differentiators to attract customers and VARs. For example, yet other infrastructure services provide abstractions that facilitate application development and hosting on the cloud. Well known examples include Platform-as-a-Service (“PAAS”), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (“IAAS”) and Software-as-a-Service (“SAAS”) hosting and development infrastructure.
Thus additionally, customers who seek to compare cloud providers are faced with evaluating different hardware configurations, different software configurations, and different infrastructure services, often without transparency to the operation of different cloud providers.